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Atlas of the World
. He flipped through it till he found the page he needed.
    His finger traced a line. Herndon and Leary were looking over his shoulder, one to the right, the other to the left. Herndon whistled again. “This is going to be big trouble,” he said. “Bigger than I thought.”
    “That’s a fact.” Clemens slammed the atlas closed with a noise like a rifle shot. Behind him, Edgar Leary jumped. “Hell of a big mess.” He spoke with somber anticipation. “But I don’t have to worry about what I’m going to write this afternoon, so I’m as happy as Peeping Tom in Honolulu, if half of what they say about the Sandwich Islands is true.”
    He inked a pen and began to write.
    If the wires are not liars—and of course experience has made us all familiar with Messrs. Western and Union’s solemn vow that only the truth shall be permitted to pass over their telegraphic lines, and with the vigilance with which they guard them from every falsehood; of course experience has done such a thing, we say, for under our grand and glorious Constitution anyone may say what he pleases—if this is so, then it seems that His Mexican Majesty Maximilian has been persuaded to sell his northwestern provinces of Chihuahua and Sonora to the Confederate States for the sum of three millions of dollars.
    This is remarkable news on several counts, which is how lawyers speak of indictments. First and foremost, superficially, is the feeling of astonishment arising in the bosoms of those who are familiar in the least with the aforesaid provinces at learning that anyone, save possibly Old Scratch in contemplation of expanding the infernal regions due to present overcrowding, should want to purchase them at any price, let alone for such a munificent sum.
    But, as the fellow said after sitting on a needle, there is more to this than meets the eye. Consider, friends. Mexico’s principal export, aside from the Mexicans whose charm pervades our Golden State, is, not to put too fine a point on it—that being theneedle’s business, after all—debt. She owes money to Britain, she owes money to France, she owes money to Germany, she owes money to Russia—no mean feat, that—and she is prevented from owing money to the Kingdom of Poland only by that Kingdom’s extinction before she was born.
    Being a weak country in debt to a strong one—or to a slew of strong ones—is in these enlightened times the quickest recipe known for making gunboats flock like buzzards to one’s shores, as the Turkish khedives will assure Maximilian if only he will ask them. Time was when the United States held up the Monroe Doctrine to shield the Americas from European monarchs, bill collectors, and other riffraff, but the Doctrine these days is as dead as its maker, shot through the heart in the War of Secession.
    So the Empire of Mexico needs cash on hand if it is to go on being the Empire of Mexico, or at least the abridged edition thereof. Thus from Maximilian’s point of view the sale of Chihuahua and Sonora makes a deal of sense, but he is apparently going ahead and doing it anyhow. The question remaining before the house is why the Confederate States would want to buy the two provinces, no matter how avidly he might want to sell them.
    Owning Texas, the Confederacy would already seem to have in its possession a sufficiency—indeed, even an oversupply—of hot, worthless land for the next hundred years. Sonora, though, has one virtue Texas lacks—not that having a virtue Texas lacks is in itself any great marvel—it touches on the Gulf of California, while Chihuahua connects it to the rest of the CSA. With these new acquisitions, the Confederate States would extend, like the USA, from sea to shining sea, and, even more to the point, run a railroad from the same to the shining same. Is that worth three millions of dollars? Pete Longstreet seems to think so.
    Yet to be seen is how the new administration in Washington will view this transaction. There